Kissina, Julia.

[UNIQUE ARTIST BOOK – WOMEN ARTISTS OF SOVIET CONCEPTUALISM] Lost world, 2021–2022.

Original artist book measuring 23 × 15.5 cm. Hand-sewn self-wrappers with 20 unnumbered leaves of illustrations hand-drawn in Indian ink. Unique copy. Item #54398

Born in Kiev in 1966, the artist and writer Julia Kissina is one of the few women associated with Moscow Conceptualism – a movement that challenged state ideology through conceptual play. In Kiev, Kissina studied with the painter and graphic artist Zoya Lerman (1934–2014), who was a prominent figure of the Ukrainian unofficial art scene. In Moscow she was mentored by the Conceptualist artist Andrei Monastyrski (b. 1949), a founding member of the legendary performance art group Kollektivnye deistviia (Collective actions). Typical of the Conceptualist movement, literature and art are closely intertwined in Kissina’s work. She began publishing her avant-garde texts in samizdat journals such as Mitin Zhurnal (MZh) starting in the mid 1980s, while she studied screenwriting at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). Her debut collection “The Dove’s Flight Over the Mud of Phobia” became a cult hit, with her literary style described as “linguistically infatuated grotesque”. In 1990 she immigrated to Germany and earned an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, turning to photography and watercolor. In 2001 she was nominated for the Andrei Bely Prize, Russia’s oldest independent literary award. She lives and works in Berlin.

Much like her writing, the images in her artist books are a kind of infatuated grotesque. They are also cinematic, with each page a perfectly composed shot in black and white. The aesthetic is resonant with the absurdist treatment of late Soviet reality by another Ukrainian artist and film auteur, Kira Muratova, whose 1989 film "Asthenic Syndrome" is a succession of uncanny scenes of emotional outbursts and haphazard sexuality. Meanwhile the childish quality of the images and the appearance of ghostly children on the pages of her books is conversant with the childhood tropes of Moscow Conceptualism, from Ilya Kabakov’s albums to Pavel Pepperstein’s cards. In an essay about Kissina’s 1994 “Hinter Dem Spiegel” photo exhibition, Boris Groys commented on Kissina’s treatment of the “spoiled child” subject, whose innocence has been lost because of the adult obsession with childhood. In her latest books, the lost innocence of animals takes the place of that of children.

Kissina started making artist books as an art student in Kiev in the 1980s, with the earliest books containing text in Russian, later in German, and more recently in English. The present collection of books is in English, with the work “Brave New World” containing all three languages, reflecting Kissina’s complex international context. The art historian Sarah E. James wrote about Kissina as a Ukrainian artist in an Art Monthly article in 2008, pointing out the Ukrainian heritage of predecessors such as Ilya Kabakov among others. Kissina’s 2017 edited German-language anthology “Revolution Noire” which included post-Soviet writers from the Moscow Conceptualist circles such as Vladimir Sorokin, Andrei Monastyrski, and Pavel Pepperstein appears more interested in the “post-Soviet” than in specific national context. In their texts, as in the pages of her artist books, the capitalist world appears to be just as hopeless and strange as the socialist one.